Damn right. Strong evidence that Europe should look after their own, and not rely on the good old US of A. Written by an Australian who thinks we should do the same down here.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/13/danish_department_dum...
Our goal is to offer a privacy-focused, vendor-neutral alternative to platforms like Microsoft Exchange.
The EU got INCREDIBLY lucky after Microsoft's rise. Linux gained marketshare. Linus Torvalds and a team. So you could probably get away by paying 100x less to Linux and really make things happen.
Did they do anything? Support it, say with half the money they paid to Microsoft? No. Anything at all? Perhaps, but not worth mentioning.
Yes. They immediately tried to push extra expenditures on Linux. To solidify the position of Microsoft. Tried to declare Linux illegal due to supporting copyright infringement/piracy. They tried to force "software warranty". Tried to make software without accessibility features illegal.
Oh wait! Linus Torvalds got paid! But ... by a US company. Plenty of companies tried to push Linux. All but one are US companies (the only real one that tried, SUSE Linux, was not just not supported, it was bought out by a US company after effectively going bankrupt).
So now we're here: if the US wanted to force Linux to implement sanctions against the ICC, they are in a much better position to do it than the EU is to stop them. No US or US ally is allowed to furnish the ICC with a Linux distro ... so who would do it? The EU doesn't control THEIR OWN BANKING SYSTEMS!
This is a repeating problem in the EU, not just for software. They utterly, absolutely, completely refuse to pay for any software at all, and as a result the EU economy pays more by literally a factor of millions. Then they refuse to see this as a problem ... and effectively US companies levy a tax on EU business, for decades. Where's the problem with that?
And this is actually an underestimation of the problem. The Microsoft ecosystem isn't just the software. It's the network, it's the applications by other firms. It's even the CPUs. SAP, Oracle, Adobe, Intel, AMD ... spending should be added to to the total. As should the spending on computers. Fucking Taiwan is in a better position than the EU when it comes to software independence.
And the EU "is working on replacing them" by spending less than ONE software engineer makes in Bangalore? Sorry, no.
They aren't.
This just means the EU doesn't care about software independence, and doesn't even care that the US taxes all software and hardware in the EU. Also they don't have a chance in hell to change it at this point. It would have been extremely cheap to do it 20 years ago, but now it'll cost tens of billions at minimum.
The ICC will be working without email, the EU can't change that and it's 100% the EU's fault. Hell, EU politicians have chosen to pay hundreds of billions EACH YEAR for the privilege of having the US control EU computer usage!
Expecting to make several times the national average gets you ousted as an evil greedy capitalist pig that wants to gentrify society, even though EU is full of stealthy elite royals and billionaires who own most of the continent's wealth, cosplaying as average people. So as long as you have a financial/tax system and a social contract that vilifies those seeking enrichment and upwards mobility through work and innovation, you're not gonna get FAANG competitors sprouting up thin air.
China could do it and become independent of US tech and they started off financially way worse than the EU. So the EU's tech failure is 100% self inflicted from policy short sightedness and mismanagement, by catering policies to the well off boomers and retirees, instead of the youth.
Stop taxing income, and start taxing inherited wealth more and you might see a change, just get off your asses politicians and actually do something, less talking and more doing. Otherwise keep buying American software running on Chinese hardware, while you hold grandiose speeches of tech independence.
There are reason why Linus Torvalds, Bjarne Stroustrup, Guido van Rossum, Anders Hejlsberg packed their toys and moved to the US to work for big-tech, instead of enjoying the amazing quality of life back home in Europe. Maybe the EU should talk to them and put them in charge of EU tech leadership, instead of the clueless unelected career bureaucrats like Von der Leyen and their lobbyists who's biggest success is selling the most diesel engines.
A 10 million per year grant starting in 2000 would easily have done it. That it's such an amount is entirely, 100%, the EU's own fault. Taking linux and developing it, plus an office suite for it could easily be done for 100x less.
And both are centre-right governments to boot! If the White House is the clownshow in the circus, the EU is the acrobatics act.
You were saying?
EU funded Microsoft to the tune of 234.26 billion USD per year
???
The relevant number is probably the EU only fraction, and maybe just the EU governments' part. Which I'd guess is at least like 1/10 or smaller? Idk
('Linux distros' get into the HN zone where nobody needs dropbox because they could write a shell script. Or install a crappy webmail package on a VPS. Google is entirely Linux and that's not what you are suggesting. It's irrelevant to the larger picture.)
It has been popular lately to complain about European states military spending, which is more than just naive given that NATO decides what can exist and an alternative to NATO would be unrealistic, especially in the shorter term.
If the EU really threatened the US in any manner, that situation would be rectified in a heartbeat. That may sound violent, but it mostly isn't. A lot of it is just the free market at play, but it is a market in harmony with US interests.
[1] https://codeberg.org/forgejo-contrib/federation/src/branch/m...
This sounds like security nihilism: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27897975
> Even if you build from source, your compiler might be compromised
This problem can be solved by the bootstrappable builds: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41368835
> or you buy a cool new usb peripheral and plug it in- boom! Compromised.
This is why Qubes OS has been developed (my daily driver). It isolated the usb devices into a separate VM.
> Your sniffer and firewall? Compromised.
Try security through compartmentalization: Qubes OS. Last time a VM escape in the modern Qubes implementation was discovered in 2006 by the Qubes founder: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Pill_(software)
It is possible using IPv6 to make end to end connections without having to do weird hole punching through NAT, etc.
A: The Europeans grow restless that we are suspending email accounts of Trump's political enemies.
B: What are they going to do, host their own email servers?
[maniacal cackling]
And of course they cannot be trusted. (Same applies for Google, Apple and any other entity in the US that can be served with a gag order and a subpoena.
The masks sometimes drop and we see the true face of who is what. And when Microsoft pulls a fast one like that it shows us the real face/where the loyalty is (and it is never to the client).